Why Chinese (Mandarin) Is One of the Easiest Languages to Learn - Reason 6

In the last article I explained how easy it was to learn the following words in Mandarin: I, Me, We, Us, You, You plural, He, Him, She, Her, It, They, Them. These 12 words can all be expressed by only learning 4 words : Wo, Ni, Ta & Men.

In this article I explain how easy it is to express the possessive form of pronouns in Mandarin Chinese. i.e. in English "I" becomes "My" and "You" becomes "Your" and so forth. Mandarin is easier.

Now let me show you how incredibly easy it is to use possessive form:

I = My

You = Your

He = His

She = Hers

It = Its

In English we can add an "s" sometimes to convey possessive. For example "it" becomes "its" or "Mom" becomes "Mom's". How much easier would English be if we would apply the "s" rule to all the pronouns so we could say:

I = Is

You = Yous

He = Hes

She = Shes

That would be much easier for a foreigner wouldn't it ? Well that's exactly how it goes in Mandarin Chinese. Just learn one single word and add it to any noun or pronoun and you have the possessive. This word in pinyin is "de" and is in fact the #1 most used word in the entire Mandarin Language. Therefore the table above in Mandarin goes like this:

(I) Wo = (My) Wo de

(You) Ni = (Your) Ni de

(He) Ta = (His) Ta de

(She) Ta = (Hers) Ta de

(It) Ta = (Its) Ta de

You will notice that His, Hers and Its are all the same spoken word in Mandarin Chinese "Ta de". You know by context of the conversation whether or not the meaning is His, Hers or Its. The written form of these 3 words are different, so no need to know context when reading Mandarin.

In the next article I will continue to show more reasons why this language, in my opinion, is easy to learn.

The Author started learning Mandarin Chinese over 5 years ago, and was amazed at how easy this language was despite what he had heard. He now lives in China in order to perfect his language ability in hopes of becoming a professional freelance translator/interpreter one day. In his spare time he enjoys tinkering with a few websites eg Wulong Tea and Feiyan Tea site.